Denzel Washington is to be honoured for his contribution to cinema at the upcoming San Sebastian International Film Festival in Spain. The Training Day star will be presented with the coveted Donostia Lifetime Achievement Award during the event's opening gala in September (14).
The presentation will take place ahead of the European premiere of the Oscar winner's new movie, The Equalizer, which will be screened during the film festival.
Previous winners of the Donostia award include Julia Roberts, Sir Ian McKellen, Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep and last year's (13) winner Hugh Jackman.

Disney
You expect a bit of schmaltz from a movie about the making of Mary Poppins. But schmaltz doesn't entail a sentiment lathered so thickly that it's feels like an anti-depressant commercial, or material so broad that it's insulting to believe that audiences above the age of five can relate to the emotionality onscreen. Saving Mr. Banks takes for granted that its viewers are fans of traditional Disney, seeming to confuse Disney fans for Disney characters, and insinuating that we bear the intellectual sophistication thereof.
The real victim, of course, is the character of P.L. Travers (Emma Roberts, charming as she can be with this material), who incurs a fraction of a storyline about overcoming (or learning to live with?) her latent childhood traumas. As a young girl in Australia (as we learn in intermittent flashbacks — by and large the dullest part of the movie, but such a hefty piece of it), young Travers adored her merry, whimsical alcoholic father (Colin Farrell, playing a character that feels as grounded in reality as Dick Van Dyke's penguin-trotting screever Bert), enchanting in his Neverland mannerisms while her chronically depressed mother watched the family crumble into squalor.
Forty-odd years later, the themes of Travers' childhood inform (sometimes directly, right down to presciently repeated phrases) her resistence to allow her novel Mary Poppins to take form as a Disney movie. In the absence of a reason for why she might have a sudden change of heart about a feeling to which she has apparently held so strongly for two decades, Travers opts to fly out to California to meet Walt Disney (Tom Hanks, wading through the script without any of the energy we know he has in his back pocket) and discuss the adaptation process.
Disney
When it's not insisting upon clunky "melting the ice queen" devices — like nuzzling Travers up to an oversized stuffed Mickey Mouse to show that, hey, she's starting to like this place! — the stubborn author's time in the Disney writer's room is the best part of the movie. Working with (or against) an increasingly agitated creative team made up of Bradley Whitford, Jason Schwartzman, and B.J. Novak, Travers protests minor details about setting and character, driving her colleagues mad in the process. It is to the credit of the comic talents of Whitford and Schwartzman (who play reserved agitation well beside Novak's outright hostility — he's doing mid-series Ryan in this movie, FYI) that these scenes offer a scoop of charm. But Travers' gradual defrosting poses a consistent problem, as it is experienced over the slow reveal of her disjointed backstories in a fashion that suggests the two are connected... but we have no reason to believe that they are.
The implications of the characters' stories — depression, child abuse, alcoholism, handicaps, and PTSD — are big, and worthy of monumental material. But the characters are so thin that the assignment of such issues to them does a disservice to the emotionality and pain inherent therein. A good story might have been found in the making of Mary Poppins, and in the life and work of P.L. Travers. Unfortunately, Saving Mr. Banks is too compelled to turn that arc into a Disney cartoon. And much like Travers herself, we simply cannot abide that.
Follow @Michael Arbeiter
//
| Follow @Hollywood_com
//

Lions Gate via Everett Collection
When we last left our heroes, they had conquered all opponents in the 74th Annual Hunger Games, returned home to their newly refurbished living quarters in District 12, and fallen haplessly to the cannibalism of PTSD. And now we're back! Hitching our wagons once again to laconic Katniss Everdeen and her sweet-natured, just-for-the-camera boyfriend Peeta Mellark as they gear up for a second go at the Capitol's killing fields.
But hold your horses — there's a good hour and a half before we step back into the arena. However, the time spent with Katniss and Peeta before the announcement that they'll be competing again for the ceremonial Quarter Quell does not drag. In fact, it's got some of the film franchise's most interesting commentary about celebrity, reality television, and the media so far, well outweighing the merit of The Hunger Games' satire on the subject matter by having Katniss struggle with her responsibilities as Panem's idol. Does she abide by the command of status quo, delighting in the public's applause for her and keeping them complacently saturated with her smiles and curtsies? Or does Katniss hold three fingers high in opposition to the machine into which she has been thrown? It's a quarrel that the real Jennifer Lawrence would handle with a castigation of the media and a joke about sandwiches, or something... but her stakes are, admittedly, much lower. Harvey Weinstein isn't threatening to kill her secret boyfriend.
Through this chapter, Katniss also grapples with a more personal warfare: her devotion to Gale (despite her inability to commit to the idea of love) and her family, her complicated, moralistic affection for Peeta, her remorse over losing Rue, and her agonizing desire to flee the eye of the public and the Capitol. Oftentimes, Katniss' depression and guilty conscience transcends the bounds of sappy. Her soap opera scenes with a soot-covered Gale really push the limits, saved if only by the undeniable grace and charisma of star Lawrence at every step along the way of this film. So it's sappy, but never too sappy.
In fact, Catching Fire is a masterpiece of pushing limits as far as they'll extend before the point of diminishing returns. Director Francis Lawrence maintains an ambiance that lends to emotional investment but never imposes too much realism as to drip into territories of grit. All of Catching Fire lives in a dreamlike state, a stark contrast to Hunger Games' guttural, grimacing quality that robbed it of the life force Suzanne Collins pumped into her first novel.
Once we get to the thunderdome, our engines are effectively revved for the "fun part." Katniss, Peeta, and their array of allies and enemies traverse a nightmare course that seems perfectly suited for a videogame spin-off. At this point, we've spent just enough time with the secondary characters to grow a bit fond of them — deliberately obnoxious Finnick, jarringly provocative Johanna, offbeat geeks Beedee and Wiress — but not quite enough to dissolve the mystery surrounding any of them or their true intentions (which become more and more enigmatic as the film progresses). We only need adhere to Katniss and Peeta once tossed in the pit of doom that is the 75th Hunger Games arena, but finding real characters in the other tributes makes for a far more fun round of extreme manhunt.
But Catching Fire doesn't vie for anything particularly grand. It entertains and engages, having fun with and anchoring weight to its characters and circumstances, but stays within the expected confines of what a Hunger Games movie can be. It's a good one, but without shooting for succinctly interesting or surprising work with Katniss and her relationships or taking a stab at anything but the obvious in terms of sending up the militant tyrannical autocracy, it never even closes in on the possibility of being a great one.
3.5/5
Follow @Michael Arbeiter
//
| Follow @Hollywood_com
//

Rod Stewart, Idris Elba, Anna Friel, Melanie Chisholm and Britain's princes William and Harry were among the stars who manned the phones on a trading floor in London on Wednesday (11Sep13) as part of a 9/11 charity event. A whole host of actors, musicians and royals joined the British leg of Cantor Fitzgerald's and BGC Partners' annual Charity Day, which commemorates the victims of America's 2001 terrorist attacks.
As part of the event, famous faces man the phones and the day's profits are donated to good causes.
Stewart was there with his wife Penny Lancaster while Prince William and his brother Prince Harry also took calls during the star-studded event.
Other celebrities who turned out for the day's trading in London included Sir Ian McKellen, Sean Bean, David Hasselhoff, Cerys Matthews, Danny Dyer and Ashley Roberts, while on the other side of the Atlantic, Mariah Carey's husband Nick Cannon, Sean 'Diddy' Combs, actor Zachary Quinto, and The Sopranos stars Edie Falco and Bobby Cannavale turned out in New York.
Last year's (13) event raised millions of dollars for good causes worldwide.

After Dark Films
It seems a bit odd to take on a movie review of Courtney Solomon's Getaway, as only in the loosest terms is Getaway actually a movie. We begin without questions — other than a vague and frustrating "What the hell is going on?" — and end without answers, watching Ethan Hawke drive his car into things (and people) for the hour and a half in between. We learn very little along the way, probed to engage in the mystery of the journey. But we don't, because there's no reason to.
There's not a single reason to wonder about any of the things that happen to Hawke's former racecar driver/reformed criminal — forced to carry out a series of felonious commands by a mysterious stranger who is holding his wife hostage — because there doesn't seem to be a single ounce of thought poured into him beyond what he see. We learn, via exposition delivered by him to gun-toting computer whiz Selena Gomez, that he "did some bad things" before meeting the love of his life and deciding to put that all behind him. Then, we stop learning. We stop thinking. We start crashing into police cars and Christmas trees and power plants.
Why is Selena Gomez along for the ride? Well, the beginnings of her involvement are defensible: Hawke is carrying out his slew of vehicular crimes in a stolen car. It's her car. And she's on a rampage to get it back. But unaware of what she's getting herself into, Gomez confronts an idling Hawke with a gun, is yanked into the automobile, and forced to sit shotgun while the rest of the driver's "assignments" are carried out. But her willingness to stick by Hawke after hearing his story is ludicrous. Their immediate bickering falls closer to catty sexual tension than it does to genuine derision and fear (you know, the sort of feelings you'd have for someone who held you up or forced you into accessorizing a buffet of life-threatening crimes).
After Dark Films
The "gradual" reversal of their relationship is treated like something we should root for. But with so little meat packed into either character, the interwoven scenes of Hawke and Gomez warming up to each other and becoming a team in the quest to save the former's wife serve more than anything else as a breather from all the grotesque, impatient, deliberately unappealing scenes of city wreckage.
And as far as consolidating the mystery, the film isn't interested in that either, as evidenced by its final moments. Instead of pressing focus on the answers to whatever questions we may have, the movie's ultimate reveal is so weak, unsubstantial, and entirely disconnected to the story entirely, that it seems almost offensive to whatever semblance of a film might exist here to go out on this note. Offensive to the idea of film and story in general, as a matter of fact. But Getaway isn't concerned with these notions. Not with story, character, logic, or humanity. It just wants to show us a bunch of car crashes and explosions. So you'd think it might have at least made those look a little better.
1/5
More Reviews:'The Hunt' Is Frustrating and Fantastic'You're Next' Amuses and Occasionally Scares'Short Term 12' Is Real and Miraculous
Follow @Michael Arbeiter
//
| Follow @Hollywood_com
//
From Our Partners:40 Most Revealing See-Through Red Carpet Looks (Vh1)15 Stars Share Secrets of their Sex Lives (Celebuzz)

If you think back to the opening lines of the Anchorman (just about the only lines you and your friends don't quote compulsively whilst intoxicated), you will recall a vivid establishment of the film's setting:
There was a time — a time before cable — when the local anchorman reigned supreme. When people believed everything they heard on TV. This was an age when only men were allowed to read the news.
And on it goes, specifying the location to be San Diego and the subject of the story to be Will Ferrell's now iconic Ron Burgundy. But the 2004 comedy's sequel looks to be taking on a different time and place — as it seems, the focus of the forthcoming Anchorman: The Legend Continues will be distinctly more contemporary than that of its predecessor. Adam McKay, Anchorman and Anchorman 2 director and cowriter (along with Ferrell), recently gave The Playlist a few bits of info about his developing followup, specifying the area of interest that will be satirized this time around: the era of the 24-hour news cycle.
"It's all about the rise of the new media and 24 hour news cycle," says McKay. "And there's a lot of interesting points to make about that while being silly." It's a well-tread territory in the world of satire, that's for certain. The likes of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have made livings from their often scathing commentaries about today's news. And Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom jumped on the bandwagon this past summer, painting the industry in a more reverent (yet hardly flawless) light.
But beyond taking down the contemporary media, McKay is clearly interested in having fun with his movie: "We have some songs already written ... whole song sequences for sure." So, we don't have to worry about the movie shirking its silly side in favor of sociopolitical commentary. Anchorman 2 looks to revisit the charm that its predecessor gave us with rainbow rides, milk-fueled hobo tantrums, and dog/bear conversations through the gift of music. And cameos! "We're talking about for Anchorman 2 ... having every single one line or three line role, just be someone we just love. Someone like Ian Roberts or Rob Huebel or Paula Killen." They got Tim Robbins the first time, so I imagine we're in for some pretty quality bit players in Round 2.
[Photo Credit: DreamWorks Pictures]
More:
'Anchorman 2' Has a Pants Party! — POSTER
'Anchorman 2' Plot Hints Dropped by Adam McKay?
Watch Both 'Anchorman 2' Teasers Here
'Anchorman 2': A History of Sequel Rumors and Why It Will Work
From Our Partners:
’Twilight’ Red Carpet: Rob and Kristen’s Awkward New Pics (Moviefone)
Ryan Gosling Birthday; 32 Reasons Why ‘The Notebook’ Kiss Is Greatest
(Moviefone)